


Five People Who Believed In Sherlock Holmes and Told John Watson So (and One Who Didn’t Tell Him)

by helva2260



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 07:17:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helva2260/pseuds/helva2260
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John might feel very alone at the moment, but he's not the only person in the world that still believes in Sherlock Holmes. Some of them, he even knows...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five People Who Believed In Sherlock Holmes and Told John Watson So (and One Who Didn’t Tell Him)

**Author's Note:**

> Edited and betaed version of my fill for [this prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/15253.html?thread=81273493#t81273493) on the Sherlock Prompting Meme. I meant to upload it to AO3 a while back, but real life intruded and I never got around to it.
> 
> Many thanks to tau_sigma for betaing for me (especially as it's taken me so long afterwards to get it posted to my account). You are the best!

Henry watches the news whilst he’s drinking his first coffee of the morning. It doesn’t make sense, so he reaches for the Sky+ remote, rewinds and watches it again.

He’s still fighting past the lingering effects of the H.O.U.N.D. drug, still waiting for his brain chemistry to find its feet again, still trying to knit reality together in the edges where it had unravelled into nothing but fear and imagination. And yet, even knowing that his mind is still half-healed and fragile…

No, he thinks numbly, this is wrong.

This isn’t Sherlock Holmes they’re talking about. This is…they’ve got it all wrong. It’s like someone took everything they knew about the man, put him in a kaleidoscope and twisted so all the parts of him fell into a different pattern.

Sherlock Holmes is - _was_ \- sharp-edged and dismissive and coldly logical and pragmatic and all sorts of unfriendly, but the idea of him making things up for the sake of publicity makes no sense of any sort that Henry can find.

The coffee goes cold, untouched as he tries to work out if they could be right. If he could be wrong about the man he thought had saved him.

But no. There’s no way.

His dad was murdered when Sherlock Holmes was a small child. Now that his doctors knew what to look for, Henry’s own medical records bore witness to the reality of the drug that had clouded his thought processes. He hadn’t planned on seeing Mr Holmes, nor sent him any information prior to their meeting; it was a purely impulsive action that had led him to the detective's doorstep. Every piece of evidence he had listed about the journey and about Henry himself, could only have been based on Henry and his own powers of observation - no openings for fakery there.

No, he’ll talk it through with Dr Mortimer at their appointment later, but he’s certain in his own mind. Sherlock Holmes was no fraud.

And the idea of the detective committing suicide from shame, after he kept his head whilst affected by a paranoia-inducing drug? That also made no sense - but then Henry was no Sherlock Holmes to extrapolate what had happened from trace evidence and scant information.

He stops at the village shop later and picks out a sympathy card. It’s more generic than he’d prefer, but he hopes that Dr Watson will appreciate the thought.

-oOo-

When Angelo hears the news, he cannot believe it.

Sherlock? Dead?

Suicide? Sherlock?

Sherlock’s work has always been dangerous of course, confronting and outwitting all sorts of criminals - after all, hadn’t he got himself very nearly stabbed in the process of clearing Angelo’s name from the murder charge? But still, he’d never thought that Sherlock might actually die. And the idea that Sherlock would give up on everything and everyone that he loved in life to kill himself - it’s almost laughable in its ridiculousness.

So why is everyone else taking it seriously?

He spends the day never far from tears, especially when he sees mobile phone footage of the fall from some passing pedestrian on the news, and has to listen to all the so-called experts tearing the character of a good man to shreds.

That night, he overhears a customer discussing the news - talking about the fraudulent detective, and the potential cost to the economy of re-trying all the cases he messed up. He escorts the customer and his dining partner from his premises personally, and asks them as politely as possible under the circumstances, not to come back.

The next day, he makes all the dishes he knows to be Dr Watson’s favourites, and packages them up in freezable cartons. It’s quite a weighty bag-full when he’s finished, and he takes it around personally, only to find that John has not returned to Baker Street since…well, since.

He begs the temporary address from Sherlock’s landlady, who bats away her tears with impatient fingers and adds a package of home-baked scones to the bag before she lets him leave.

The family resemblance is remarkable, he thinks when the door opens and he’s greeted with polite wariness by a woman who can only be John Watson’s sister. She’s stocky but fit, with short dark-blonde hair and a careworn face, and she eyes his bag of food with bemused curiosity when she waves him through to the living room.

John stands to greet him, and Angelo bustles forward, setting the bag down in favour of reaching to draw John into a solid hug. He can feel John’s stiffness, and the way he all but shudders at the contact, and moves back reluctantly, unwilling to put the poor man through any more discomfort.

“I shall not intrude upon your time,” he declares, “but I wanted you to know that I believe nothing of what they are saying about Sherlock. What do they know when they never met him?”

He lets some of his own pain and bitterness show through with the last, and Dr Watson responds to it with a flash of recognition, of mirrored misery.

They trade polite sentiment and John is vehemently appreciative of the food offering, but Angelo can see the distance in him still, and takes his leave reluctantly. As much as he wants to rage against the injustice of it all, it’s clear that anything more would be too much for John at the moment.

-oOo-

Kirsty struggles to make the writing even and make sure each of the tails come up at the right angle to join onto the next letters properly. She is proud of having got a gold star for her joined-up handwriting in class last week, and this is an important card for her to write. She has drawn a rabbit on the front and decorated it with glitter so that it’s a fairy rabbit.

She writes:

“ _Dear Doctor John Watson_

_I am sorry to hear that your friend Sherlock Holmes died. It is very sad but I am sure he is in heaven with all the good people like Albert Einstein and Marie Curie and Auntie Edna. Mummy said that he helped her find Bluebell again even though now she does not glow any more and has smaller ears. Mummy says that the news people are confused and he was not pretending and really was clever._

_Lots of love Kirsty Stapleton (aged 8 1/4)_ ” 

She hopes that Doctor Watson will like the rabbit picture, and that it makes him feel better.

-oOo-

Mike hears the news on the radio, while he’s brushing his teeth. He chokes on his toothpaste and coughs, and has to sit down on the side of the bath to steady himself.

It’s on the BBC, and so his instinct is to trust what they’re saying, but he can’t reconcile the portrait they’re painting with the man he knows. It’s possible, he thinks, after all, all those murder cases you see on the news, with the neighbours saying what a nice man he was and I’d never have guessed. Except, he doesn’t know anyone (with the possible exception of John Watson or Molly Hooper) who’d call Sherlock Holmes a nice man, so it’s not like that at all, really.

It takes him four days and innumerable newspapers to make his mind up. The hospital canteen has been running rife with rumour, each one wilder than the last, and it makes him sick to witness.

He takes the afternoon off to drop by Baker Street, and discovers from their distraught landlady that John’s staying with his sister at the moment. He spends half an hour trying to comfort Mrs Hudson, and comes away feeling emptier than ever, with a damp shoulder.

When he finally catches up with John, it’s to find him dry-eyed and silent, still caught in the moment of watching Sherlock fall. Mike finds himself involuntarily reminded of the morning they’d met by chance eighteen months ago: John’s back is held ramrod straight, his gait more marching than walking, his face so defensively neutral that it was hard to believe he was the same John Watson that had laughed his way through medical school, or the same John Watson that had rolled his eyes and grinned while recounting Sherlock’s latest antics with a client a mere month ago. This is John Watson fresh from a war zone.

Mike thinks of all the possible openings to this conversation. Gentle sympathy doesn’t seem the right fit for a hard-eyed John, and bland commiseration would probably be offensive. Mike wonders how many people have already hurt John by their assumption that Sherlock betrayed his trust, and settles for acknowledgement of the circumstances.

“Sherlock Holmes was a first-rate multidisciplinary scientist who excelled in all of the biological, chemical and forensic sciences - and also an ornery sod who couldn’t be bothered with social niceties when there was an interesting experiment in the offing. I’ve watched him work. I’ve proof-read some of his papers and been part of the peer-review process for others. I introduced you to him, if you remember. I _know_ he wasn’t a fraud.”

John’s mask cracks briefly, and he takes a long, shaky breath. His shoulders relax fractionally.

“Thank you,” he says.

-oOo-

John returns one day to Harry’s, after a walk, to find that a cream envelope with his name on it has been hand-delivered through her letter box.

Torn between curiosity and lurking dread, he opens it to find a card exceptional only in its taste and discreet elegance, written in a loose, flowing hand that loops and swirls, even as it occasionally stutters with age. Distantly, he remembers a card with similar writing appearing at Baker Street earlier in the year, and Sherlock attempting to hide a flattered smile even as he verbally dismissed it as a grateful but dim relative of a client and consigned it (rather carefully if John remembers correctly) to a desk drawer.

“ _Dear Dr Watson,_ ” it says,

“ _I feel that I must write and convey my sympathies for the loss of your friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes. His talents and vitality will be missed by all who knew him and of him, and I wish that we had had the opportunity to meet in person. I can only hope and trust that the wrongful damage to his reputation can be repaired in time, and the truth of his deeds known once again._

“ _With all my best wishes,  
your grateful client, E._ ”

John sets the card down with a trembling hand, and wipes the sudden tears from his face. He puts it back in its envelope and carries it upstairs for safe-keeping. He’s not sure what he feels.

-oOo-

Molly isn’t sure what she should or shouldn’t say. Or how to say it, if she should ever work out what “it” is.

She wants to tell John everything, to reassure him, to stop him looking like his best friend’s died - which he did, at least as far as John knows, so that’s not really a good way of phrasing it even in her own mind. She wants to hug him hard and let him cry the numbness away. She wants to see his face relax into any emotion other than the terrible frozen mask that he’s become.

She can’t even look him in the eye. It’s guilt of course, because she could stop his pain by talking to him, but she knows he thinks it’s because she believes in Sherlock’s guilt.

And maybe she would give in and tell John, if it wasn’t for the fact that Sherlock had begged her for this one (albeit massive) favour. For the fact that he had (for just this one essential time) confided in her everything, the words spilling out in a way that she had never expected from Sherlock of all people. All his conclusions about the way that Jim had set the trap; his certainty that people whose lives had interwoven with his would be punished for the crime of knowing him; his reasons for suspecting that there would be back-up plots in place to ensure that he had no choice in the end, even to the point of endangering his closest acquaintances. Or at least the ones that Jim thought were important - and this was key, because Sherlock’s plan hung on the belief that Moriarty had forgotten to take Molly into account.

At the last, before Molly left to put their plan into action, Sherlock had grasped her shoulders in his hands, his fingers firm but somehow tentative, and then he leaned in to kiss her briefly on the forehead. It felt like a goodbye from a brother.

“Thank you,” he said, stepping back again. His eyes had met hers solemnly and then skittered away, already thinking twenty steps ahead to the inevitable confrontation. “If this doesn‘t work…” His voice stopped and he fell into silence, searching for words.

She tried to smile reassuringly, but her lip felt suddenly wobbly and she ended up biting it nervously instead. There was no guarantee that it would work, and no way for her to convince him of it.

“I’ll do my part,” she had said, and fled.

She could tell John all of this, but she won’t. Because if Sherlock’s right - and Sherlock is almost always right - John’s still in just as much danger as when Jim was alive. And it’s John they’ll be watching.


End file.
